Success Isn't Always Success

You’ve accomplished your mission, solved the problem you’re justified by, and honorably stewarded the generosity of personal and corporate philanthropy. In a word, you’ve succeeded – if (and this is a BIG IF) you’re serving for solving.

Are you curing cancer?

Don’t you want to??

Do you proudly wear your “This Shirt Saves Lives” t-shirt from the St. Jude Foundation???

Well, they’re not there yet, but they’ve clarified and focused their mission marketing lately – shifting from something like “take care of all the poor children who don’t deserve cancer” to a two-part message – save lives, help end childhood cancer (I’m guessing they don’t mind if the rest of us also benefit, but we’re not the charity erotica that triggers sympathy like a chemo-balded child).

If successful, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and similar organizations like Atlanta based CURE (as in, Cure Childhood Cancer) don’t eliminate the possibility of a child developing cancer, but if the unfortunate happens, they’re there to create the possibility of a future – a cure. Some prevention education may be part of this, and treatment, hospitalization, family support (think Ronald McDonald House), but cure – as in solve the unsolved – is the fundraising marketing that seems to work.

How about hunger – as in world hunger?

This is more than food insecurity or economic development to end food deserts in urban communities, or nutritional programs in public schools, or the Super-Sized and Big Gulp Ban efforts – we’re talking the agricultural, geo-political, religio-ethnic and therefore complex global inequities where most of the world has enough calories to live (or just survive) each day while others don’t.

Put it this way: Are you successfully solving a problem or just feeding the hunger machine? It's an important distinction - one that too many of us in the nonprofit world miss too often.